by Allen Wold
"Karyl went her own way after that, and got into trouble more than once, and appeared on Malvrone more than once, and then disappeared altogether. I suspected that Karyl and my father resumed their relationship on her visits to Malvrone, and perhaps on his visits elsewhere, but I never again found any proof.
"Arin was blackballed from exploiting, though nothing was ever proved, and dropped out of sight for a while, then showed up again as a Gesta, and established his reputation, and collected stories about his exploits, most of which he could never have accomplished.
"After a while I began to establish my art dealership networks, both the legitimate one and the black market, and came to make the acquaintance of several Gestae, including, to my surprise, Arin one time. We met a few times after that, always on the best of terms, always with utmost discretion.
"Then, when Sigra was kidnapped, and nothing Father could do seemed to do any good, I suggested that Arin Braeth might be of help.
"At first Father refused, but when it became desperate he yielded, and I got hold of your father, and that's how that happened.
"I visited your folks on Pelgrane whenever I could after they got married and Father kicked Sigra out. Arin didn't hold it against Father that he reneged on his deal to pay for Sigra's rescue, though he did for disinheriting her—for her sake, not his—but I always felt guilty about that.
"And that's how I know Karyl Toerson."
By this time they had finished their meal, and for a moment sat in silence. Without a signal that Rikard could detect, the Grelsh servant came in, served them a desert and after-dinner drink from the cart that this time he—she?—took away.
"I suspect," Gawin said to Rikard, "that part of the reason my father is so down on you and your father is because Arin knew about the infidelity with Karyl, as I did, and Father is protecting a guilty conscience."
"That's a hell of a story," Rikard said.
When he'd known his father, he'd just been that, a father, with enough money so he didn't have to work. It had only been long after he'd disappeared that Rikard had discovered that Arin Braeth had once been known as the most daring Gesta in the Federation. Neither his father nor his mother had talked about the past much, and he was beginning to realize now that there was indeed a past, and a lot of it. "And what you tell me about Karyl Toerson," he went on, "doesn't make me any happier about the cyclopeans and their ruins."
"I think you can just scratch that set of ruins off completely," Gawin said. "She was the one who messed up the old Human site on Venerian, from the days when we were just developing starflight."
Rikard could only stare at him in shocked amazement.
"And she destroyed the Belshpaer ruins on Turbidos," Gawin went on, "and looted the temple of Ikarion on Sigmund. That was all before she dropped out of sight, of course, but I've often wondered how many other places, which were found desolate, were her doing, especially if one or two especially good pieces did get into the black market. If she's got her hooks into the cyclopeans, and if she's getting any help from my father, then we don't have much time to spare. If there's another site out there somewhere, we'll have to get to it before she finishes with this one, and make sure she can't do anything to it."
"But aren't we wasting our time?" Grayshard said.
"No," Gawin said even as he rose from the table. "I've been running preliminary searches since I got here twelve days ago. My data banks here are more extensive than at Malvrone, and the computer is more powerful, and the connections are more extensive. Let me show you."
He led them out another way through a series of large rooms, each beautifully furnished and filled with art of all forms. His computer center, on the other hand, was a very simple place, with very little art. There was just the one major console, built into the wall, with a rather large chair in front of it, two chairs and a heap of cushions for Droagn around a low table with repeating screens so they all could see what Gawin might call up, and a self-service bar in the corner.
"I'm sorry," Gawin apologized. "In spite of having a system like this I'm really not an expert at either computers, or historical research, and so I don't feel that I've been able to do much until now. I'm hoping that your expertise, Rikard, and your computer knowledge, Droagn, and your differing perspective, Grayshard, will come in handy."
"Maybe you'd like to look at these," Rikard said, and showed him the disks from the cyclopean computer.
"You're damn straight I would," Gawin said.
He took the disks from Rikard, and first made a copy of all thirty on his system's internal memory, then gave Rikard back the originals. Then, with Droagn looking over his shoulder, he tried to access the data, which proved completely unintelligible. "Oh, well," he said, "I guess you've got to start somewhere."
They worked on the problem of the cyclopean data during the next two and a half days. At first Droagn just offered advice on how to probe the files, but he quickly took over the task, while Gawin told him what his software could do and how.
They tried out a variety of analyzers on several parts of the data simultaneously, looking for graphics, tables, text. Because the cyclopean language was color dependent, and they had no idea how it was encoded, they could not at first tell which was which, though the analyzers did identify several different types of data structures, which could have been almost anything.
Eventually, under Droagn's hands, the analyzers were able to find pictorial graphics, which were easily decoded, since they used a digital format practically identical to that used in the Federation to produce a two-dimensional onscreen representation. After all, a picture is a picture, and bits are bits, and once the ratio of vertical to horizontal pixels was found, the rest was easy.
Some of the pictures were meaningless, though Rikard and his companions were certain that they were shown as intended and were not just coincidental constructs. But some of the pictures were strictly representational, for whatever reason, and among other things, they showed cyclopeans against planetary and city backgrounds, with other species, specifically the centaurian Charvon, the arachnoid Ratash, both extinct; the extant miklewboid Kelrins; and the humanoid Thembeär, and the serpentine Ahmear, both now departed. Some of the "photos" were taken in what could only have been spaceships.
It was not unusual for a planet-bound species to disappear altogether, but starfaring species usually left some record, and aside from the cones, which had been uniformly misinterpreted, the cyclopeans had left nothing, and unless they had just departed this part of the galaxy, as the Ahmear had done, there was no explanation for that.
The pictures were not useful in themselves, but their computer structures gave the investigators some clues as to how to interpret other graphics, more diagrammatic in nature, and the computer then could begin to identify what parts of those images were captions, and from that figure out some of the nature of the more preponderant text files.
They did determine that the written language was probably ideographic and not alphabetic, which meant that it would take a very long time indeed to translate the text, certainly not within their lifetimes. The computers, however, seemed to indicate that there were several languages, and that would be of help to scholars more capable of dealing with that particular problem, by enabling them to make comparisons. But for the moment the computer restricted its searches for illustrated text, and thus they stumbled on a section of astronomical data.
Gawin's special knowledge of the Federation and the worlds within it came in handy here, and though the charts embedded in the cyclopean text were strange, the computer was able to make a comparison between current data and that of the cyclopeans. The stars had moved considerably since the cyclopean text was recorded, two million years ago according to the analysis. But the pictures in the Ahmear text could have been no older than one and a half million years, for the same reason. So it followed that the cyclopeans had been active for half a million years or so, a very long cultural lifetime indeed, taken on the average. But this only
deepened the mystery—how could they have left so little when they had been around for so long?
Gawin's data included a chart of those planets with cyclopean ruins. The arrangement of those worlds, compensating and correcting for the passage of time, corresponded with other charts in the cyclopean text. And one world in that text was specially marked, with simple graphics that could easily be interpreted. It was the most important world in their star nation. The corresponding system was in the academic database. It was not far off, but a system with no regular transport. But that was all they needed to know.
They spent another day recovering from their labors, then Rikard made his good-byes, and he and his companions left for what he hoped was the cyclopean home world.
DRG-17.iv
The Federation is only one star nation in civilized space, though a moderately large and important one. Long established and well organized, almost all of its component stars and systems are identified and registered in one index or another.
Most stars have no planetary systems and so are only given catalogue numbers. Of those systems with planets, most are lifeless, and they too are merely numbered, though in a different catalogue. Those systems with life have names if they are visited by a starfaring nation or species, or are utilized in some way by them, but they and the others less frequented are more usually known by a special number, one component of which indicates the relative life level in the system. The remaining systems and worlds—a relatively small fraction of the whole, of course—are in fact catalogued by their names, which are meaningful to the inhabitants, the owners, or to history.
Some few worlds, however, have ceased to matter to the rest of the Federation, and their names are forgotten. They are entered into a very small catalogue, which mentions only briefly their forgotten history. Such was the world that was Rikard's destination. The system, identifiable also by relative star position, had, according to the catalogue, once held a civilization, and was now known only as DRG-17.iv. The code number indicated that it once had been inhabited at a certain level, had been destroyed to a certain extent by war, was now to a certain degree uninhabitable, was number seventeen of that kind, and was fourth from the sun. About the previous inhabitants, their civilization, the cause or origin of the war, or its outcome, nothing was mentioned. Indeed, nothing was known.
Though DRG-17.iv was not very far from Tarantor, Rikard did not go there directly. Instead he had his charter ship take him to Novo Boskva, one of the worlds in the Federation where ships were manufactured. There was no jumpslot station at DRG-I7.iv, no shuttleport, and if he was going to investigate that world, he needed a ship that could navigate from the jumpslot to planetary orbit unassisted, and which carried shuttlecraft of its own. A Federation courier could have landed on the planet directly, one of the few starships able to do so, but it wasn't big enough to carry the equipment Rikard wanted—and besides, they weren't generally for sale.
Once on Novo Boskva, it took some twenty standard days to locate the kind of ship Rikard wanted, and the kind of pilot who would serve his needs.
Otherwise, their stay on Novo Boskva was uneventful, as was their trip to DRG-17.iv. Their pilot was a competent Human woman, named Anita Bardolino, who had some previous experience with Gestae, and so was not surprised or at a loss when Rikard expressed a desire to be cautious in their approach to the system. She flickered on past, then drove in from the far side toward an arbitrary jumpslot on inertials. It added three days to the trip, but during that time she was able to utilize the extensive system of probes and detectors with which the ship was equipped, and could determine with reasonable certainty that there was indeed no jumpslot station. Nor was there any other starship above the size of courier, or anything orbiting the planet in question other than its moon. And if Karyl Toerson were somewhere out of range, waiting for Rikard to come by, she was on the wrong side of the system, and too far away to detect him. Also, it was customary to end a flicker trip at the north pole side of a system, so the pilot came in from the south, between the fourth and fifth planetary orbits. From all they could tell, they were completely alone.
From there it was two more days' slow drive toward the planet itself. Rikard was in no hurry here, he wanted to give the long-range scanners time to survey the surface, which proved indeed to be lifeless, with no atmosphere remaining. Though once life had existed there, war had obliterated it. He also scanned the large moon, of something more than one percent the mass of the parent planet, and equally lifeless though, unlike the planet, that was almost certainly its nature, and not the consequences of the war.
Optimal orbit for an unassisted shuttle drop to the surface of the planet was well within the orbit of the moon, and their trajectory brought them past that large body, close enough so that optical imagers could observe its surface. It was tidally locked to the planet, of course, and its far side, though in darkness at this time, showed signs of some kind of artificial installation. The lunar surface facing the planet, as they came past, revealed not only the normal and expected cosmic scarring, but more recent marks, made within the last one and a half million years, perhaps, damage caused by the intensity of whatever had happened on the planet itself.
On an inhabited world, orbiting craft and stations are approximately equatorial, but the pilot put the ship into a polar orbit, so that they could examine the entire surface. But though they used a full battery of sensors and scanners, they needed only their eyes to see that the planet had indeed been scorched. Much of what had once been land was now a congealed sea of glass, though there were some polar and equatorial areas that escaped total melting. There were few craters, mostly in the shallower sea bottoms. There was no water anywhere, not even at the poles. It had all boiled off with the atmosphere.
But, as the sensors and scanners proved, there were indeed remains of the civilization that had once existed here. Some of these were under some of the thinner slag areas, and there were hints of something else, perhaps, under some of the glass. But there was nothing in those polar or equatorial areas, which was almost certainly why they had escaped absolute destruction in the first place— nothing there to destroy.
While they scanned the surface of DRG-17.iv, an entirely different bank of sensors kept watch on the rest of the system. They detected no flicker drives, no inertial drives, no gravity drives during the ten days that they surveyed the dead world. What they would have done if Karyl Toerson had shown up, Rikard wasn't sure. He was just as glad he didn't have to find out.
But at last they had done all they could do from orbit. They identified the best of the ruins, at a slag margin between a glass sheet and a merely burned area, and took a shuttle to the surface there.
During their trip and approach Bardolino had acquired some knowledge of their intentions here, and being of an adventurous nature herself, she asked if she could accompany Rikard and his companions on their explorations. Having an extra perspective—and an extra gun—seemed like a good idea to Rikard, so he told her to come along.
They all had to wear full pressure suits, of course. Rikard had had his helmet specially modified to accommodate his recording equipment, which would not only take visual images, but record all voice and radio communication as well.
Thus prepared they came out of the shuttle onto the desolate surface. The ruins of the cyclopean building, half a kilometer away, was identifiable only because they had seen others before. It was only the stub of the base of a small cone, the rest had been blown away. They brought out their equipment on a series of four floaters, and went to it.
Though the material of the cyclopean structure had not eroded as it had on other worlds subject to atmosphere and water and dust, it had been partially melted by nearby blasts, and the vacuum and unimpeded solar activity for the last one and a half million years had had their own peculiar effect. The surface of the cone was semitranslucent, a dirty grayish blue, and totally dead.
The material of the stub of the cone, thus metamorphosed, was harder th
an what they had found elsewhere. All signs of the original color symbols were long since gone. But even without Droagn's Prime to guide them, they could see, dimly through the semitranslucent material, shadows of interior spaces. They found the one nearest the surface and cut their way through.
Here the chambers and passages were as distorted as the Ahmear ruins on Trokarion had been. It slowed their progress as they moved inward five shells and downward three levels, since they had to squeeze through some constricted places, and break through artificially sealed doorways as they went. But the walls became less translucent, less dirty gray-blue, and less distorted, though the effects of thermonuclear destruction and hard vacuum exposure persisted until, all of a sudden, the material of the cone resembled marble once again.
They could not go farther in, but only down, and as they went to the next level the material of the cone regained its pearly sheen, and below that level they found everything perfectly preserved. This was all new to Bardolino, of course, and she was fascinated.
As were the others, since this place had not been abandoned like the others they'd visited, but killed and sealed, and thus there were furnishings in the chambers, surface coverings on corridor floors, decorations on the walls, and hangings from the ceilings. There had been no erosive effects at all since the war completely sealed off the cone with the destruction of its upper levels.
Rikard recorded everything, and they were tempted to linger and examine everything, but now was not the time. Maybe when they came back out. Now they just went down another level, and along a passage past chambers with open doors, looking for the next ramp down.
In one chamber they even found the desiccated remains of some of the people themselves—fragile to the touch, and distorted by dehydration, freezing, and sudden vacuum. Here they could not help but pause.
The remains of those people were huddled at one side of the chamber, where they apparently had died all at once. Some kind of radiation must have penetrated, even where heat did not. Rikard recorded it all but did not try to take any samples. They closed the chamber behind them, to preserve what they could against future investigation.